The gaming industry has long been trying to develop gaming devices that are more exciting and enjoyable to play. When gaming devices are more exciting and enjoyable, they tend to be played more by players and they tend to generate more revenue for the gaming device operator or provider.
For example, spinning reel gaming devices are well known in the prior art and have long been a staple of the gaming industry. These games utilize one or more actual or apparent cylindrical reels that spin around an axis in response to the player's activation of the game. Game symbols are displayed on the outer circumference of the reels. Typically, the game is won and a prize is awarded when the game symbols on the reels provide a particular predetermined outcome shown when the reels stop spinning. As a result, a three-wheel game might provide a large award to the player if the outcome is three bars in a row displayed by the three co-axial and adjacent reels, as viewed by the player.
For wagering game tables, however, there have been much fewer tables that utilize spinning reels. One such example that has become well known in the industry is roulette. Roulette uses a wagering mat and a single separated spinning reel having a plurality of numbered receiving channels positioned peripherally around the center of the reel. Players place wagers on the wagering mat at one or more positions, wherein each position has a predetermined pay ratio depending on the probability of winning. The dealer then places a ball on an upper inwardly-angled edge of the reel and the reel is spun. As the reel slows and the centrifugal force on the ball becomes less than the gravitational force, the ball rolls toward the center of the reel and is captured in one of the numbered receiving channels, thereby indicating the winning wagers, if any.
These spinning reel games can be made more exciting to the player, and thus more likely to be played, by addition of features such as flashing lights, sounds, double bonus time-periods, and progressive linking of multiple such games to a common jackpot in addition to the local jackpot for each machine on its own. These methods of making spinning reel games more exciting and more utilized are well known in the art. However, they still present the game player with only a limited number of winning combinations.
With regard to roulette or spinning wheel games in the prior art, they typically also have the wheels mounted at their axial center on axial drive shafts. Mounting and rotating the wheel on an axial drive places significant stress on the drive shaft and associated drive and support structure. Also, an axial mount and drive mechanism is typically noisy and easily damaged or moved off-center during use or installation or movement of the game apparatus. Axial mounting also occupies significant space for the axial drive behind the wheel, and it requires significant additional and complicated structure in order to drive multiple concentric wheels independently.
One of the disadvantages of spinning reel gaming devices is that they only allow a player to see a small number of game symbols on the reels. Because of the physical curvature of a reel, it is generally only possible for a view of the symbols of on a reel to be within a player's view. This is not the case with wheels. Wheels may have annular surfaces around the entire circumference of a wheel. Therefore, wheels can display a greater number of symbols than reels.